Big spender Gordon's plan to save his skin

So the time is ripe to look at the leastexplored option in British politics lately: the one in which Gordon Brown is not pushed aside but returns from damp Suffolk and simply ploughs on. I remember asking one phlegmatic No 10 civil servant at the height of the Tony Blair-Gordon Brown infighting what would happen next after a particularly heated period. "Nothing probably: it usually does," was the reply.

Some truth lurks still in this laconic judgment. It is still a major deal to heave a Prime Minister out of office, especially when a party is so divided about what it wants. Anyway, we are heading fast towards the time when it will be impossible to do so before the September conference without delegates receiving brochures full of pictures of the wrong leader.

That is precisely Mr Brown's survival plan. He is applying the same tactics as Mr Blair once used to string him along by refusing to name a departure date: setting targets and focal points every few weeks to ensure there is not space for a swift challenge, even supposing his enemies finally mount one.

To this end Operation "SOS Gordon" is well under way, albeit with some hitches like the immortal John Prescott's comparison of his leadership with the captaincy of the Titanic. Is there no Trappist monastery into which Mr P can be forced for the summer months for the good of his party?

Of more lasting interest was Alistair Darling's Today Programme interview yesterday. Mr Darling rarely sets the house ablaze with his rhetoric but here was an intriguing peep into the Downing Street bunker and its plans for the great Gordon revival. The Chancellor, expressly failed (twice) to rule out a stamp-duty cut to help the ailing housing market, which suggests that it is no longer a question of if, but simply how much and for how long, when he makes his pre-Budget report in the autumn.

The Treasury is hard at work over the summer months with a rescue plan to convince voters that the Government is not powerless to help as their bills shoot up.

In his defence of public spending as a motor to the economy, Mr Darling let rip his inner Keynesian. He indicated that the Government's strategy will be to spend its way out of the recession as far as possible - and pick up the tab afterwards. Or more likely, leave a Conservative government to do so.

A cool £3.5 billion has thus been added to the Northern Rock bail-out this week - conveniently without Parliament being around to scrutinise it. A billion here, a billion there and soon you'll be talking real money - the old American joke about spendthrift politicians suddenly seems apposite to the previously cautious Chancellor. Debt is already running at nearly half the level of GDP.

Add to that a hint that he might be more generous with local authorities to enable them to buy up new houses and flats built by companies who now can't find buyers and the tally just keeps on mounting. What he is not going to do is take the advice of some Blairites (and Old Tories) and embrace a tax cut to push more money back into the economy. That is not the Brownite way

What Mr Darling is signalling to an unquiet Labour Party is that the PM will very soon drop an economic relief plane from the skies to aid mortgagesufferers and people struggling with energy bills - and that it should do nothing to impede this. Downing Street aides are busily pointing up the contrast between Mr Brown's economic experience and the lack of it amassed by his main rival, Mr Miliband. " Gordon is the best man to steer Britain through tough times" is thus the loyalist chant of choice.

He intends to return, guns blazing, with a Cabinet reshuffle which will, I am told, strengthen an under par Treasury team. At no time has this outfit been more important and yet looked so uncertain and unconvincing. Mr Darling showed some signs of improvement and steadiness yesterday and was also emboldened by the fact that he could speak on the economy without Mr Brown looking over his shoulder. What he still lacks is the intangible but vital asset of confidence - he sounds perfectly sensible but, like the rest of us, rather worried.

Aside from Yvette Cooper as Chief Secretary, who is not to everyone's taste but knows her way around the job, there are few other players. Jane Kennedy and Angela Eagle are standard-issue mid-performers, incapable of reassuring anyone. Kitty Ussher has promise but she is an inexperienced Economic Secretary for a crisis period. The only ministers who sound hardedged and understand the private sector and its concerns in a downturn, Liam Byrne and John Hutton, are deployed elsewhere.

One impact of the viciousness of the credit crunch and mortgage squeeze is that they are left goldfishing about their old aspirations while the situation shifts around them. So Ms Cooper is still associated with pushing for a major expansion in house-building in the South-East at the very time when homebuilders are suffering most from the borrowing crisis and the idea of new mass developments is simply out of time - and money.

The entire message and thrust of the Government needs to change to reflect the altered circumstances. I saw little of that in Mr Brown's speech to Labour's policy forum after the Glasgow East defeat, warning us about "waking up" in Tory Britain when many more people are worried about waking up to find their houses repossessed.

When he returns, apparently with plans to rally the Labour faithful, he will need a more persuasive argument as to what he has to offer to stop things tipping further towards the Opposition. Otherwise the plotting will simply resume in autumn, with greater momentum the longer the polls fail to improve

What Mr Brown will not do, is what his enemies consider the decent thing - namely quitting voluntarily. When I put this thought to a close personal friend (not on the Government payroll), he pointed out that for all the horrors of the past six months, "Gordon actually likes being Prime Minister and will fight harder than his detractors realise to keep the job". That is what "Project September" is all about. Whether it works or not, it won't come cheap.